seven questions with moria young // blog tour

29 April 2014

*fangirls* i love the dustland trilogy so much so you can imagine my excitement when i was offered to be a part of the blog tour for the final book- *jumps up and down* i'm not going to bore you with my random dances [i can't dance really] so without further ado, please welcome the amazing moira young to my blog as she answers questions about her writing process and the blood red road film [italics are needed because SQUEEE.] p.s for those of you who haven't read the books yet *glares*. guess what? i am holding a giveaway for the whole series! pp.s this is a long post. get some food first. and then settle down. :)

What was your writing process when it came to creating the characters of the Dustlands Series? Did you draw character profiles, brainstorm and use inspiration from people you knew - or did they all pop into your head fully formed? Who was the character that was the hardest for you to vivify?

The characters of Blood Red Road all grew
from Saba's voice. As she spoke her story and I wrote it down, she told me
about her father, her brother, her sister, her dead mother and so on. She
seemed to know everything about everyone - and why not? it's her story - and so
long as I listened to her and didn't try to steer the ship, it all just came
very naturally. The one character who took longest to reveal himself was Vicar
Pinch, her main antagonist. I was still discovering him as I was working on the
last edits. DeMalo stepped into the story because I realised that if Saba's
story was going to be told over another two books, she would need a powerful
adversary. So he wasn't added to the narrative until almost the last moment.
But he seemed to have been waiting in the wings because he just walked onto the
page, fully formed.

snape approves of salmo slim's sassy-ness...
and my alliteration.

In Rebel Heart, Salmo Slim rattled onto
the page, driving his camel cart and singing. I didn't know why or what he was
doing in the story until late in the second draft so I just let him do his
thing until it became clear. He's a lively old guy; it was quite hard to shut
him up. My willingness to meekly accept these character invasions drives my
friend Sophie nuts. She says, "Moira! It's your book, you're in charge!
When somebody turns up uninvited, stop and ask him what the hell he's doing
there and don't let him alone until he tells you!" Slim knew precisely why
he was there, turned up on the right page at the right time and hung in there
till I figured it all out. I'm always the last to know.

The only time I did character profiles
was during the writing of Raging Star. I'd done two months of
preparation on plot, characters, structure and themes but around 10,000 words
into writing, I realised that there was a very real danger of the book
collapsing well before I'd reached the midpoint. And the trouble was with my
big cast of characters. I
knew the story would move forward as each character made decisions in pursuit
of their goal so I had to go back and study them very carefully, one by one.

I have yet to experience the feeling of a character taking control over my writing. *sigh*. So how long did it take between you to
have an idea for a novel and it becoming a published, bound book?

Blood Red Road
took around four years to become what it is, but you have to take into account
that I was a complete novice. First books often take years to write. I started
work on the earliest versions of that in the autumn of 2006, various publishers
bought it in the spring of 2010 and it was published in June 2011. I started Rebel
Heart in August 2010 and it was published two years later in August
2012. Raging Heart kept me busy non-stop from June 2012 until this
March, with publication in May so that's just a shade under two years. But
these last two books were with well established characters so how long it will
take to grow my next story, I really can't say. I'm hoping to start something
in the late summer but at the moment I have no characters, no plot, no setting,
no story, just the barest itch of an idea, so who knows?

Wow is all I can say, although I really want to become an author - the question is: do i have the patience?! What are the top five things someone
needs while writing and why?

Well, all writers are different. I can only
tell you what I need, and that is:

A ROOM OF MY OWN

I need a space that is mine and only
mine where I do nothing but read, write and dream. I wrote Blood Red Road at home
and there were far too many distractions. I'm a champion procrastinator, so a space
outside of the home is crucial for me.

TIME

I don't write quickly. I'd be surprised
if I could ever produce a book a year; YA and children's publishing are
notoriously demanding of writers.

QUIET

I work with earplugs in. They don't
just muffle outside noise, they seem to silence the chatter inside my head,
which is invariably negative and damaging.

NO INTERNET

It's far too distracting, positively fatal
for procrastinators. I have no internet connection in my little writing room.
When I'm writing, I also give my mobile phone to someone in one of the other
offices and get them to lock it in a drawer. They have strict instructions not
to give it to me until the end of the day, no matter how piteously I beg.

SUPPORT

Writing is such an intense process that
if I didn't have my husband to take care of me,

how to write a book - panic

I would end up a malnourished,
babbling mess. Wait. I do end up a
malnourished, babbling mess. And that's with
his wonderful support, so I can't think what state I'd be in if I didn't have
him. I also depend upon my writers' group. We've been together for ten years,
ever since we met at a City Lit writing for children course. We meet every two
weeks and the simple fact is that I wouldn't be a writer without them. I
couldn't do without my agent. She's lovely and kind and wise and the best in
the world. She helps to keep me sane. Then there's my wider community of writer
friends, all of whom know the ups and downs of the writerly life; I count on
them for advice, cups of tea and a good old moan from time to time.

Mhmm. Yup. Internet. Procrastination. I know all about that...In what ways did your first novel
change from the first draft to the last and do you wish you had kept any
'deleted' scenes in the final edit?

Oh, it went through radical changes. My first run
at the story that would become Blood Red Road was called Dark
Eden and was set in the Peak District of the UK during a new ice age at
some point in the future. It was told in the third person and had dual narrator
viewpoints: Alexander who lived in a tightly controlled hierarchical biosphere
society and Saba, a cave dweller in the outside world, who lived in a clan
system. I wrote about 20,000 words of that version. The only things that
survived and went on were the names Saba, Lugh and Emmi.

The next iteration of Dark Eden was a
sprawling, disconnected, absolutely hopeless draft written over three and a bit
years. Saba was now the sole narrator, but her voice roamed all over the place,
there was an unfeasibly long time gap between the beginning and middle sections
and the story was confused, to put it mildly. But. It contained early versions
of some characters; Maev

how not to write a book - panic

and the Free Hawks, the Pinches, Ike, Molly and Jack,
mostly with different names. Towards the end, there was a lakeside scene between
Jack and Saba. As I was approaching the last scenes of Rebel Heart, I thought,
"Oh my God! This is where that scene belongs!" Bear in mind this was
three years later. There was a deadly attack on the Free Hawk camp in that
messy Dark Eden and it turns out that very event was necessary to Rebel
Heart.Looking back, I can see that my subconscious was quietly making Rebel
Heart while I was struggling with Blood Red Road.

It was a messy, confusing and difficult
experience finding my way to and through Blood Red Road. But I learned the
value of hanging on to even the most unpromising bits of writing. Now I always keep
my deleted work in one document. It's like a big messy shed that I go ferreting
in when I'm looking for something specific: "I know I described moonlight
coming through a window, now where is it ...?"

That is a very radical change! Haha. Before you started Blood Red Road,
had you attempted any other novels? And did you originally plan to make the
Dustland Series a trilogy or did it just evolve that way over time?

I wrote a picture book followed by two humorous books for younger readers, which I thought might make a little series. I accumulated a fat file of rejection letters for those, which I've
kept.

rejection letters even affect a cat's mood...

So, I'd never attempted such a large
writing project and there was an immense gap between the scale of my vision and
my writing skills, which were very basic. I had to learn by doing and failing
and trying again, over and over. If it weren't for the ongoing support of my
writers' group, I would never have written Blood Red Road, let alone two more
books. I certainly didn't plan for it to be a trilogy. If I'd known that's what
lay ahead for me, I would have been so petrified I would never have written a
word. I had only one goal and that was to somehow finish writing this (insert
expletive of your choice) book that had dogged me for so long. But as I was
nearing the end of three and a half years' work on that first book, I began to
get an inkling that this was just the start of a much larger story for Saba,
although I had no idea what that might be.

Rejection letters..I feel like I should prepare myself now for those...How did you go about writing your
first novel and do you think the way you wrote and the speed that you wrote
changed as you went along? Or was an equal time spent writing each of the three
books?

I've talked about this a little bit above, but
the main thing is that writing Blood Red Road taught me the
necessity of solid, practical, craft skills. By the time I came to write the
second and third books, I had a much better understanding of the narrative
structure required to move and carry and turn the story and its multiple plot
strands and themes. As for my writing speed, if I can write a usable 300 to 500
words per session, I'm satisfied. I'll just add that most writers say it never
gets any easier. Every time you start a new book, it's terrifying and seems
like an impossible labour. And every book comes to life in a different way.
Some have to be squeezed from you, some fly out, some come in fits and starts
and you just have to go with it and not fight it. You have to trust the process
and write down some words of your story every day and eventually, at the end of
it all, you'll have a book.

I need to trust the process. I need to trust the process. *mutters*. Finally, I have read that Blood Red
Road is *hopefully* going to be on the big screen someday! What was your first
reaction when hearing about that for the first time and do you have any qualms
about it? Also, if you could pick any actors at all, current or otherwise, to
play your main characters - who would you choose?

When my film agent called, the first
thing she said was, "You better sit down." Luckily I did. My legs
would have gone when she told me that Ridley Scott had read the unedited
manuscript, loved it and wanted to meet me. I'd barely had time to understand
that I'd finally finished this damn book, let alone the fact that almost
overnight I'd become a person with agents and book deals, oh and there was the
little matter of my husband only narrowly avoiding a heart attack in the middle
of it all and coming home from hospital full of stents. From Easter to August
2010, I was in a constant state of mild shock. In those four months, my life
changed completely.

book-to-film-adaptions.
moira was this you? ;p

Movies are in my DNA. My
heart-on-sleeve adoration of them is clear on every page of Blood
Red Road. In many ways, it's a sustained homage to every movie I've
ever loved, including the films of Ridley Scott. So meeting him was a
memorable, extraordinary privilege and a distinctly out-of-body experience.

Do I have any qualms about it? The
honest answer is yes, some. But I accept that movies are seldom the same as the
books they're based upon. I absolutely trust my producers, who are hugely
experienced and passionate about this project, and we've got an excellent
screenwriter on board. I know that everybody involved will do their best to do
my book justice.

Thinking of actors is good fun. I'd go
for a classic movie star mash-up. Jack would be a combo of Clark Gable,
Harrison Ford, Humphrey Bogart and Hugh Jackman, all in their salad days.
Saba's a tough one; Sigourney Weaver crossed with Clint Eastwood by way of Jane
Greer maybe? I expect they'll be mainly unknowns. Maybe a star will be born.
Wouldn't that be something?

that would be something awesome! maybe i'll be that star - i could play saba and become rich and famous and buy a house with wall to wall books and go to BEA and..*le sigh*. nope. anyway! i hope you all enjoyed reading moira's answers but don't leave yet! you haven't entered my giveaway yet.. a Rafflecopter giveaway

Haven't read this trilogy, sadly, and the first time I've heard of them was when my friend asked me to buy the first book for her as a gift. I did, and I got jealous because it seems like a really good book and I want to pick it up.